Teacher Program Brings NASA Research to Schools across America

How many high school teachers and students can say they have presented their astronomy research alongside professional scientists at an international conference? Participants in NITARP can!

More than 50 teachers, students and astronomy educators from the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP) will be attending the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), running from January 4 through January 8 in Kissimmee, Florida.

For over a decade now, NITARP has partnered small groups of educators with a research astronomer for original, year-long, authentic research projects. At the AAS meeting, the educators from the 2015 class, along with some of their students, are presenting the results of their work over the past year. Meanwhile, the educators from the 2016 class will meet their teams and get started on their own projects.

In addition, nine self-funded NITARP teacher alumni are also returning to AAS to network and showcase projects they have done after being intensively involved in the program. A NITARP alumni educator's student will attend the meeting as well.

A total of 98 educators from 34 states have participated or will participate in 2016. NITARP works with educators because, through them, NITARP reaches thousands of students per year with information about how science really works, what NASA does, and the wealth of astronomy data that is freely available to the public.

Here are the teams that are presenting posters at the AAS meeting this week:

This team combined data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; optical) and the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS; infrared) to construct a color-magnitude diagram of Type I active galactic nuclei (AGN). The best color-magnitude correlation was found between the SDSS z and 2MASS Ks bands for redshifts between 0.07 and 0.08.

This team used infrared data from the Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), combined with optical and near-infrared data from other archives and data from the literature. They searched for young stars in a region called IC417, near which several young clusters are thought to reside. They discovered more than 100 young stars.

The 2015 educators will now go on to conduct at least 12 hours of professional development for their colleagues in their schools and communities, at the local, regional, and national levels, in print and in person.

NITARP is announcing today the 2016 class of educators and their teams, as follows:

They will present their results, with their students, at the 2017 AAS winter meeting to be held in Grapevine, TX.

The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), based at Caltech, in Pasadena, CA, is leading this program. These teams use archival data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (part of the Spitzer Heritage Archive, SHA), the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), all of which are based at IPAC, and other NASA archive holdings. Funding comes from the NASA Astrophysics Data Program.